Thursday, July 28, 2011

Shaelynn Farnsworth and Erin Olson invited me to contribute to the Just One Tweet narratives that they used during their presentations at #TICL11 and #BLC11 on the benefits of Twitter in education, below is my narrative.I joined Twitter in May of 2010 after hearing Russ Goerend talk about his PLN of 1,000 all of that year. For the first month I added lots of people and a majority followed back. It was a great way to learn about new social media and web 2.0 tools that I use on a daily basis.The first people that I interacted with that I’d never met before are Ron King and Northern Lights Pizza last summer. The most eye opening and inspirational person I know is Beth Ritter Guth. We met this spring when she was the winner of a video camera contest I hosted. I sent two cameras to Mouth of Wilson, VA where they planned on using them to make podcasts to share with the public schools in the county and use QR codes to organize them. What makes this so inspirational is that she works in a private boarding school and is using them to help out the rest of the poorer community and open up kids to their remote world. Most kids in their county drop out and of the ones that don’t, only 4% go onto college.It has also been a great way for me to connect with people even WHILE I’m attending conferences like #itec10 and #i11i. They are state level education conferences hosted annually in Iowa. I presented with a classmate and Russ Goerend at ITEC on “Breaking Down The Walls Of Our Classroom”. At the Iowa 1:1 Institute I was one of the few students who attended and went to sessions the whole day. I find these conferences fun not only because it’s a big tweet-up but because I like involving myself in everything. It’s that moment of honor when you reach the end of the tunnel and can say I was part of that 10 years ago that put the U.S. back on top.This summer I followed Robin Phares because truthfully, there was an iPad in her profile picture (Apple fan boy in your presence). She sent a tweet about wanting Google Sites to show in one of her classes she is teaching this summer. I gave her a link to the three I made to represent learning using Project Based Learning this year. There were many tweets to come and another awesome student to meet on Twitter, Ivan Shires. I plan on hanging out (Google+ instead of Skyping) into her class and talking to these teachers in Ohio when I live in Iowa. The class is on how you can use PBL to improve learning instead of the 100 year old lectures. We will blow their minds apart, all because of Just One Tweet.- Ian Coon @Waukeestudent